Recently a friend and I played with the idea of Kintsugi —the Japanese practice of mending broken pottery with gold, as a radical metaphor for mending our own broken shards.

Our human tendency is to discard or completely bury the broken parts of ourselves. We can’t imagine that they might be of any value, let alone that we can be whole, again.

But, what if we are wrong?

What if thoughtful, careful, deliberate tending to the places we are broken is akin to painting them with gold? What if compassionate self-Kintsugi could make us even more beautiful than we thought possible?